Claire M.

Fontaine May 31, 2009

Online Teaching Communities from Preservice through Proficiency

Professor Nick Michelli

Urban Education Ph.D. Program
CUNY Graduate Center
Educating Educators

Defining the issue

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Claire M. Fontaine May 31, 2009

Transitioning from pre-service preparation to full time work as a classroom teacher presents

significant personal and professional challenges to inexperienced educators. Regardless of

whether one is working in an urban, suburban or rural context or something in between, the sense

of responsibility and feelings of isolation and self-doubt can be overwhelming. New teachers are

often assigned to more challenging classes avoided by experienced teachers with seniority

privileges. Furthermore, the working conditions in schools can lack collegiality and thus seem

hostile to newcomers seeking guidance and support.

The frustration experienced by new teachers is a primary cause of the current teacher

retention crisis. The teacher retention crisis is not, as is often believed, primarily due to high rates

of teacher retirement, increases in student enrollment, or a failure to recruit teachers to work in

those schools categorized as lowest performing. Recent studies suggest that it is our apparent

inability to retain the most credentialed teachers in our lowest performing schools that has

fueled the crisis. According to a November 2008 report of the State Educational Technology

Directors Association (SETDA), teacher turnover in public schools nationwide costs taxpayers

$7.3 billion annually, as 40 to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years.

New York City public schools alone lose about $115 million each year to teacher turnover

(CPRE, 2007).

Teachers who leave cite serious problems with the instructional, collegial and systemic

conditions of their working environment (Futernick, 2007). Schools serving low-income student

populations are worse at providing new teachers with mentoring and support. It makes sense that

schools with fewer resources in general would also tend to have fewer resources in particular to

support the mentoring needs of new teachers. Schools with more resources also tend to present

less frustrating working conditions that mitigate the threat of attrition to some extent. This

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“support gap” suffered by new teachers in high poverty schools is linked to lower measures of

job satisfaction in the short term and higher rates of new teacher attrition (Johnson, Kardos,

Kauffman, Liu & Donaldson, 2004).

Comprehensive induction, which refers to an integrated program of high-quality structured

mentoring, common planning time, ongoing professional development, and membership in a

multi-site network, can staunch attrition to half of what it would be otherwise (Ingersoll &

Kralik, 2004). When schools commit to providing high quality comprehensive induction to new

teachers, the investment pays off, literally; for every $1 invested, schools see a payoff of $1.66

over a five year period. (Villar & Strong, 2007). However, only one percent of teachers

nationwide have access to a comprehensive induction program of the scope outlined above

(Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). Furthermore, few states provide fully funded mandated induction

programs, in large part because induction has historically been regarded as a district or school

responsibility (Britton, Raizen, Paine & Huntley, 2005).

The task facing stakeholders, particularly state departments of education, local school

districts, and university teacher education programs, is to develop innovative and paradigm-

bending systems and structures that support new teachers as they make the difficult transition

from the pre-service preparation program into full-time positions as classroom teachers across a

range of different contexts.

Reviewing the literature

The existing structures that define the work that takes place in schools are relics of a

nineteenth century factory model of teaching and learning. These structures are predicated on the

labor needs of an industrial economy, the prevalence of scientific management-inspired

approaches to employee management, and behaviorist learning theory - conditions that no longer

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reflect the context and mission of our educational system. What is more, one third of the current

teacher workforce are members of the Baby Boom generation. The impending retirement of this

generation of teachers will necessitate fundamental changes in how teachers’ roles are

conceptualized inside schools if schools hope to attract and retain new teachers of the Millennial

generation (Carroll, 2009, p. 46). Coinciding with the demographic shift within the teacher

workforce is a similarly dramatic demographic shift in the student population, already underway

and already challenging previously dominant school practices premised on the notion that

teachers can address the learning needs of all students using the same strategies (Darling-

Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

Schools, Carroll argues, must adapt to their new role as twenty-first century learning

organizations. But new teachers today are entering schools where, by in large, they will work

independently of their colleagues physically as well as mentally, as if in parallel universes and

not just the next classroom over. Although earlier generations of teachers reported finding

independence and freedom in working alone, the majority of teachers today now are looking for

more collaborative work environments. Lortie’s (1975) landmark sociological study of teachers

reveals that in the past teachers expressed a strong preference for solitary labor performed in the

privacy of their classroom, but teachers today articulate a growing interest in workplace

collegiality, communities of inquiry, and boundary-crossing collaboration. While teachers have

attempted to translate prescriptive pedagogical approaches into more constructive learning

experiences for students, teachers themselves still enjoy precious few opportunities to work

collaboratively and engage in generative thinking and agentive action (Johnson, Berg &

Donaldson, 2005).

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Claire M. Fontaine May 31, 2009

According to Behrstock and Clifford (2009), the private sector excels at creating

opportunities for newer employees to learn the skills of the trade by working in teams with

colleagues at all different levels of the organization. While the prospect of a teaching career

appeals to many talented young people, particularly since the collapse of the financial sector,

teachers’ working environment leaves much to be desired from the perspective of Generation Y,

also known as the Millennials. New teachers certainly do not expect schools to remodel

themselves after dot com startups, but they are interested in working in organizations that value

their potential contributions and find ways of breaking through traditional hierarchies.

This is, at a certain level, all about control. It is part of reconstituting teaching as a clinical

practice profession in which teachers themselves enjoy a measure of control, and the respect

such control implies, over their work. Online communities are one way of enabling teachers to

exercise agency and to define for themselves the support they need to do their jobs effectively.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has been the primary proponent of the idea of

teaching as a clinical practice profession through its Teachers for a New Era initiative. This

reform initiative seeks deep and fundamental change in the organization of teacher education

programs, including such areas as “allocation of resources, academic organization, criteria for

evaluating participating faculty, internal accountability measures, and relationships with

practicing schools” (TNE Prospectus, 2001). Carnegie works with selected colleges and

universities nationwide to develop exemplary teacher education programs. These exemplary

programs can then serve as models going forward to other institutions of higher education that

want to develop state-of-the-art teacher education programs for the standard primary route to

employment as a beginning professional teacher.

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Claire M. Fontaine May 31, 2009

To speak of teaching as clinical practice “extends the conversation about the teaching

profession beyond institutions of higher education to a wider policy and practice audience”

(Alter & Coggshall, 2009, p. 2). It is a way of characterizing the nature of teachers’ work in the

classroom by referencing other broad types of work that one might engage in. For example, we

customarily categorize occupations into crafts and professions. Crafts are occupations like

plumbing or woodworking in which the majority of training occurs on the job, through practice.

Professions, such as law or architecture, on the other hand, are occupations that require a

substantial course of study before professional practice begins. But the craft-profession dialectic

fails to account for occupations in medicine, which typically require advance academic

preparation in addition to an ongoing course of study throughout one’s career.

The notion of the clinical practice profession adds nuance to the stark craft versus profession

dialectic, and if applied to teaching, can point toward a different, better approach to teacher

preparation. Alter and Coggshall identify four distinguishing characteristics of a critical practice

profession, which they draw from reviewing the literature in teacher and medical education.

These are: centrality of clients, knowledge demands, use of evidence and judgement, and

community standards. In other words, competency in a clinical practice profession necessitates

grounding in a body of academic content knowledge, but the emphasis on judgement and client

agency within clinical practice means that this academic preparation must be supplemented with

practical context-oriented preparation. Therefore, the education of a clinical practice professional

has three basic components: academic grounding; practice-based training; and ongoing learning”

(Alter & Coggshall, 2009, p. 3). This third component means that the education of a clinical

practice professional is not conceptually limited to the preparation that occurs before an

individual’s professional practice begins. Rather, the education of a clinical practice professional

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Claire M. Fontaine May 31, 2009

is conceptualized as beginning in the preservice period, continuing in the early stages of the

individual’s professional practice, and extending throughout much of the professional career.

Online learning communities and online communities of practice for educators are related to

the notion of teaching as a clinical practice profession in two ways. First, both proceed from a

common premise that the responsibility for preparing and developing teachers must be shared

between institutions of higher education and local school districts. Second, both online

communities and conceptions of teaching as clinical practice maintain that teacher learning

should be an ongoing process, and as such must be sustained past the initial induction period and

into subsequent phases of teachers’ professional development. Historically, institutions of higher

education have handled the preservice component and local districts have focused their efforts of

providing mentoring services to new teachers and offering professional development

opportunities to mid-career educators. Ideally, however, both the institution of higher education

and the local school district would expand the scope their involvement to encompass the

preservice period through the first few years of induction. Online communities represent an

expansion of the role of the university in the induction process insofar as they position teacher

education faculty and more experienced graduates of teacher education programs as on-demand

just-in-time mentors to new teachers.

Dede (2006) argues that online teacher professional development (oTPD) programs represent

a more viable model for delivery of mandated professional development services than the

traditional model of school-based seminars. According to Dede, Ketelhut, Whitehouse, Breit and

McCloskey (2009),

Generally, these programs are available to teachers at their convenience and can provide

just-in-time assistance. In addition, they often give schools access to experts and archival

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resources that fiscal and logistical constraints would otherwise limit. Furthermore, online

professional development programs also are potentially more scalable than those that

depend purely on local resources and face to-face interactions. (p. 9)

Given the current, rather dismal state of in-service professional development, there is reason

to be skeptical of quick-fix solutions. Yet, it is true that schools should be getting more out of

their professional development expenditures. In the 1990s, school districts spent the equivalent

of $200 per pupil on professional development related expenditures for their teachers (Killeen,

Monk, & Plecki, 2002), figures that must be even higher now. Yet teachers still overwhelmingly

report frustration with the professional development they are offered. According to Dede et al.,

professional development programs impose costs in terms of time and resources while not

necessarily improving teaching practice. This is because many teacher professional development

programs consist of “fragmented, intellectual superficial” seminars (Borko, 2004) and do not

provide the ongoing support that might assist teachers in actually implementing new curricula or

pedagogies (Barnett, 2002). Teachers dread these sessions and may pass them by daydreaming,

doodling or grading, largely because they resent the intrusion of the farce that professional

development has become.

There are many different forms of online teacher professional development and a great deal

of variation in quality among these programs. It will be essential to distinguish among different

models for online teacher professional development to ensure that programs are adopted for the

right reasons, because they help teachers to improve their teaching practice and create gains in

student learning. To the extent that online communities for new teachers promote improvement

in these areas, the model can be leveraged into online teacher professional development

programs (oTPD) for teachers in all stages of their careers. These online supplements and

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alternatives boast the distinct advantages of fitting into teachers’ packed schedules and offering

access to high quality resources that may not be available locally.

For example, sometimes new teachers hesitate to ask certain questions of their assigned

mentors - questions related to classroom management, for example - for fear that the information

about teachers’ self-perceived weaknesses may find its way to the employer and be used against

them. An online forum may entail less risk to one’s professional reputation than consultation

with a mentor who shares a supervisor with the new teacher. Online communities connect

teachers to additional sources of support outside of what is traditionally provided by their

employer. Former classmates now working as teachers in a different district, experienced

teachers of that subject area in the local schools, paid graduate students interested in community

of practice development, teacher education faculty and arts and sciences faculty can all

contribute in different ways and help new teachers successfully transition from preservice to in-

service teaching.

Online learning communities also liberate teachers from any need to wait for a scheduled

face-to-face meeting with their assigned mentor to address their issues and concerns. Instead,

teachers are empowered to seek out solutions strategies and resources for addressing their

problems at their convenience. Ultimately, it seems likely that the online learning community

will evolve into a space where teachers seek support related to certain domains of their practice

as opposed to other domains where expertise is located at the work site.

There are indications that states have already begun to re-conceptualize professional

development for teachers. A recent report of the State Educational Technology Directors

Association (SETDA) entitled Empowering Teachers: A Professional and

Collaborative Approach (2008), asserts the need to “shift the focus from continuing

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education credits and stand alone courses to a comprehensive approach to professional learning”

(p. 3). SETDA recommends three methods that states can take advantage of to enhance their

capacity to provide ongoing, relevant and continuous learning opportunities for teachers: online

learning communities, education portals, and mentoring. SETDA characterizes online learning

communities as spaces for teachers to exchange resources, and education portals as one-stop sites

for diverse users like teachers, parents and administrators to access needed resources related to

classroom instruction. Perhaps the ideal online teacher community would find ways of

addressing all three of the aforementioned avenues of effective professional development.

Profile of Tapped In

Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) is a demonstration project of

National Commission for Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF). One of the project’s central

goals is to encourage and enable university teacher education programs to participate with local

school districts in the work of supporting and socializing new teachers as they transition from

preservice preparation to full classroom teaching.

TLINC connects preservice teachers and new classroom teachers to university faculty, peers

and colleagues, and accomplished educators in an online learning community using the Tapped

In platform. Facilitating reflective practice and resource sharing, Tapped In aims to accelerate the

development of professional proficiency and improve the retention rates of early career educators

by supplementing the support new teachers already receive in face-to-face mentoring situations.

Tapped In has existed in its current form since 2002 when it was rereleased after an extensive

redesign. Before the redesign, from 1996 to 2002, the community took the form of a MUD

(Multi-User Dungeon), a “network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality

whose user interface is entirely textual” (Curtis, 1992). By way of further description,

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A MUD is a software program that accepts “connections” from multiple users across

some kind of network (e.g., telephone lines or the Internet) and provides to each user

access to a shared database of “rooms,” “exits,” and other objects. Each user browses and

manipulates this database from “inside” one of those rooms, seeing only those objects

that are in the same room and moving from room to room mostly via the exits that

connect them. A MUD, therefore, is a kind of virtual reality, an electronically-represented

“place” that users can visit. (Curtis, 1992, p. 1)

While the Tapped In development team “chose open-source, Java-based solutions... to

implement a redesigned system that would be robust, versatile and scalable” (Farooq, Schank,

Harris, Fusco & Schlager, 2007, p. 9), even the new iteration of Tapped In continues to rely

heavily on a spatial metaphor, substituting a college campus for the dungeon. Figure 1 is a

screenshot of the schematic Tapped In uses to represent itself which illustrates this metaphor in

action.

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Figure 1: Tapped In Campus Map

One of the salient challenges that NCTAF has identified through its TLINC project is the

difficulty of transitioning from a heavily supported model to a self-sustaining model of

community computing (Farooq et al., 2007). Community computing refers to the as “socio-

technical interventions and infrastructures that support community interactions and civic

activities among people sharing common resources” (p. 3).

Problems arise in community computing when the technological infrastructure does not meet

the requirements of end users. For example, imagine that a user comes across a forum in which

teachers are discussing ways of using video in the social studies classroom. Ideally, teachers

would be able to embed videos from Vimeo or TeacherTube in the forum, just as they might

embed videos in a personal blog. But perhaps the forum is not a rich media environment with

embedding capabilities. In this case, users cannot view the video inside the site. They will

instead have to cut and paste the URL of the recommended video into a different browser

window. This limitation of the technological infrastructure detracts from the viability of the

community because it directs traffic outside of the site rather than generating traffic within the

site. High traffic environments have a way of generating more traffic still.

Community computing projects can also struggle to generate sufficient social capital to

support significant contributions by members of the community. Imagine, for instance, that one

user is debating whether to join in a conversation taking place in a forum. The forum

conversation surrounds a new teacher who has appealed to the community for strategies and

systems that will help her maintain a degree of order and focus when she brings her classes of 30

eighth graders to the computer lab. She does not have access to a projector and only 23 of the

computers are operational. The first user might have useful experiences and ideas to relate, but

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she may also be a prolific blogger who participates in various online communities and aggregates

her distributed participation using a blog. She would like to extract content from the site, the

record of her participation, using an RSS feed. If this feature is not offered, she may be dissuaded

from spending too much time in this community and may elect instead to focus her participation

in communities whose environments support data transportability.

It will be difficult to sustain a critical mass of users over time if conditions like these are

present. If a given infrastructure fails to support the types of activities users are interested in

engaging in or fails to provide meaningful support within a reasonable frame of time, then users

will abandon the community and find another, more active and better supported, community of

users.

These conditions - of a mismatch between end user applications and the technological

infrastructure of a community computer initiative - are most likely to prevail when “community

activities and practices are supplied hierarchically, such as by formal institutions, instead of

developing organically and being maintained by the community” (Farooq et al., p. 3). According

to Rheingold (1993), this can create an impression among users that the environment does not

belong to the users but instead to the institution, which tends to depress participation rates.

Underutilization limits the vibrancy of the community and ultimately portends its erasure.

Schlager and Fusco (2004) discuss general principles which they believe should be used to

guide technological design and development of online communities of practice for teacher

professional development. Their three design strategies include: investing in bonding

social capital to maintain feedback loops between community end users and designers;

providing multiple online gathering places for engagement with a range of community

end users; and reinforcing leadership roles organically from within the community.

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Farooq et al. (2007) adopt a participatory approach to engaging users in the design of a

community computing infrastructure developed through an institutional initiative. They report on

their successful approach to facilitating communicating between end users and developers. They

implement four channels of communication including contact and bug forms, a needed features

group, a task list and a help desk staffed by community volunteers and leaders.

Recommendations

States can take measures to support the development of online communities of practice and

online teacher professional development programs. They can, for instance, provide grants to

researchers studying successful ways of leveraging the networked community to enhance

teaching practice, retain qualified teachers, and promote student achievement. States can also

work in collaboration with teacher education faculty to reexamine the state-mandated preparation

and coursework requirements to include participation in an online community of practice. States

can also provide incentives to individual schools that tend to hire graduates of a particular

teacher education program to deepen their involvement with the institution of higher education

by agreeing to provide a clinical setting for preservice teachers. The additional opportunity for

collaborative discourse across institutional boundaries is another way of strengthening the

relationship between institutions of higher education and local school districts. Finally, states can

allocate resources to support comprehensive induction and continued professional development

activities grounded in practice, including online learning communities and online communities of

practice for teachers.

States, districts and schools can take certain steps to help teachers capitalize on their online

professional development activities, and to translate these experiences into their teaching

practice. They might, for instance, create instructional technology mentor positions that are

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designed to support teachers in incorporating new practices and resources into their instruction,

as recommended by SETDA. They might also link education portals to online communities.

Education portals are powerful engines promoting equity of access to all teachers regardless of

the supports offered or withheld by their home district. Developed using federal funds in

combination with state funding sources, education portals represent a rich resource repository

which could become even more useful as databases of practice linked to online

communities in which teachers discuss ways of making best use of the curricular and

instructional resources. States should also allocate funds alongside the federal government for

research into the effectiveness of job-embedded professional development for improving the

retention rates of new teachers and linking new teacher practices with enhanced student learning

outcomes.

School district professional development leaders should work to cultivate relationships with

higher education institutions. Insofar as they identify ongoing learning and the integration of

technology into instruction as desirable teaching practices, school district professional

development leaders should advocate for folding these aims into the mission statements and

curricula of teacher education programs.

Public school administrators should commit to fully funding comprehensive induction

programs and ongoing professional development programs when states and school districts fail

to appropriate sufficient funds for these purposes. Administrators should consider applying a

portion of their technology budgets to teacher professional development, especially in light of the

fact that vast increases in technology expenditures in recent years have gone underutilized in

schools, because insufficient resources have been set aside to help teachers develop the capacity

to make use of these new tools. Furthermore, administrators should seek more input from

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teachers about their professional development needs and interests before deciding upon the shape

and scope of professional learning opportunities they will make available to teachers. They

should then back up their professional development programs with an authentic commitment to

sustainable professional development expressed through their firm support of teachers’ efforts to

implement changes to their teaching practice in connection to their professional learning.

Institutions of higher education should provide transitional support to graduates of their

teacher education programs. They should supply this support online because these new teachers

work in geographically disparate areas and have many competing claims on their time. But they

should adopt existing platforms aligned to their needs rather than developing infrastructure in-

house, which requires ongoing investment of significant financial and human capital resources.

Just as online communities can fail to take root if they are not grounded in the needs of the

community, they can also fall prey to budget shortfalls. Unless funded initiatives achieve

sustainability, the loss of financial and human capital resources to maintain the infrastructure will

cause the community to wither.

Implementation

Basically, I am suggesting that institutions of higher education should redirect their attention

from the development of in-house platforms (Farooq et al., 2007; Schlager & Fusco, 2004) to the

extension of widely used platforms. But perhaps these robust efforts at making a community

computing infrastructure responsive to the needs and desires of the community are misplaced. To

elaborate, when the development process for Tapped In was beginning, there was a dearth of

viable models of online communities. Thirteen years later, online platforms for social

networking, resource sharing and collaboration continue to proliferate. Despite the significant

investment of time and resources that has already been devoted to Tapped In, it no longer makes

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sense to devote limited financial and human capital resources to the maintenance of the

infrastructure when so many viable alternatives already exist.

One peculiarity of the online teacher communities explored in the existing literature is their

reliance on metaphors for virtual space. Tapped In presents itself as a metaphorical campus, as

depicted in Figure 1. Another example, depicted in Figure 2 is BEST: Beginning and

Establishing Successful Teachers, an online community of practice for common branch teachers.

This project of the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong in Australia, relies on

the metaphor of an internet cafe for its backstory (Herrington, Herrington, Kervin & Ferry,

2006).

Figure 2: Homepage of Beginning and Establishing Successful Teachers website

Both of these projects fail to appreciate that users are by now sufficiently familiar with the

premise of virtual environments that it is no longer necessary to liken them to physical spaces.

Prospective teachers entering through the primary traditional pathway of undergraduate study are

members of the Millennial generation. The idea of online spaces is practically mundane to this

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audience. No conceptual leap is required, and so the campus metaphor adds little to their

experience. In fact, the metaphorical overlay may depress participation rates among the

Millennial demographic because it suggests that the community is not attuned to current

practices and thus not likely to address their concerns.

Institutions of higher education that want to expand their role in the induction of new

teachers will extract maximum benefit from their investment by selecting an existing platform

with a vibrant critical mass of existing users and a robust and supportive community. More

specifically, I would recommend: 1) LinkedIn with Huddle; 2) Ning; 3) Learn Central. These

may prove to be equally if not more viable platforms. For example, LinkedIn, when integrated

with a Huddle workspace, offer the same range of functionality as Tapped In.

Figure 3: Group-related functionality on LinkedIn

It offers opportunities for communication with individuals and whole networks through the

LinkedIn interface, as well as opportunities for resource sharing and collaboration similar to the

Group function of Tapped In through the Huddle workspace.

Figure 4: Personal and group workspace environment in Huddle through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is already a popular site for professional social networking. Aesthetically, it is cleaner

and has a more professional feel than Tapped In.

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Figure 5: Tapped In personal office

Ning offers a dynamic environment for user created social networks, and it boasts a

particularly large following in education-related fields. But the most promising alternative may

be Learn Central, a nascent social learning network for education, now in beta release. Users will

have to decide on the appropriate platform by assessing the goals of the project and then testing

out various options. As the needs of the community evolve, project managers can simply move

their community to a more appropriate platform.

According to Lenhart (2009), 75% of adults 18-24 currently use social network websites like

Facebook and LinkedIn. Use of social network websites is also rising among adults in general.

For example, the share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site

has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the

Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey. Many other users may

be considering creating a profile on a social network site, but may need some encouragement to

actually do so. Also, it can be very time consuming proposition to maintain engagement with

multiple online communities. Communities of practice are more likely to develop into robust,

vibrant and expansive communities when they are not positioned in competition with services

which new teachers are already making use of in their personal and professional lives. Given the

time constraints facing teachers, online teacher communities can maximize traffic by adopting

platforms which many teachers already use for personal and professional purposes, or platforms

that integrate well with teachers’ existing online identities.

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